Shared experience

In 2008, Joy Moore ’81, H’10, was on “a safe and comfortable career track,” working as an administrator in private secondary education in Los Angeles. Then she found herself suddenly changing course and spending four years in South Africa, far from her husband and teenage children, helping to run Oprah Winfrey’s Leadership Academy for Girls. “I wanted to know,” she explained to her audience, “What was I made of.”

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Seventy-two Boston College women were meeting for dinner in the Cabaret Room of Vanderslice Hall in late March—as they had met nearly once a month since September. Of them, 63 were seniors on the verge of graduating; nine were mentors from among the University’s faculty and staff. Together they made up a program called Rise, which emerged this year out of the Women’s Center.

Rise was created after a University study found that female students suffered from declining confidence levels between their freshman and senior years. (It’s a finding that has been demonstrated at other universities, as well.) “What we are trying to do is launch these students as confident women as they leave Boston College,” says Katie Dalton ’03, MA’07, director of the Women’s Center and herself one of the nine. The program has brought the women together for frank and searching conversation, as a way of sharing perspectives on issues that young women face as college ends.

The women helped themselves to buffet-style pasta and salad, found their assigned round tables, and prepared to discuss Joy Moore’s topic, “The Courage to Make Difficult Decisions.”

In its early years, Oprah’s grade eight–12 school for 400 impoverished girls was rocked by sexual abuse scandals. Moore, who is now Boston College’s associate vice president of alumni relations, was hired to turn the place around. She’d applied for the interim head-of-school job on a whim, forgot about it, and then one day found a “harpo.com” email in her inbox proposing a telephone interview. It must have gone well: Oprah’s vetters skipped over the next step—a video conference—and invited Moore to Chicago. As she walked into the cavernous conference room, she suddenly realized, “I never asked who I was interviewing with.” Scanning the room, she saw giant television screens and a small assembly of people who would turn out to be from the Oprah Winfrey Foundation and/or lawyers. Oprah’s BFF Gayle King was there, and then Moore saw Oprah herself.

“Hi. I’m Oprah,” Oprah said, extending a hand. “No kidding,” thought Moore—though, as she told her audience, the word that came to her mind was something stronger.

When the laughter died down, Moore told the women that the job offer had felt like a crossroads. Six months with 8,000 miles separating her and her family? But she knew she and her husband could make it work, and so she went. When the term ended and she was asked to stay on, Moore felt pulled to serve. “Working with young girls in difficult circumstances,” she said, “you get swept away. I felt called to come out of what was comfortable.” And so six months turned into four years. Her daughter, then in eighth grade, would ask her, “Why are you there with them and not here with me?” Her friends would ask, “What kind of mother leaves her children like this?” Her own mother, however, was completely supportive. Moore relocated to the United States and Boston College in 2011, but still reflects on what she called “my personal pilgrimage to strengthen my core as a mother, a wife, and a person for others.” She told her audience, “I wanted to learn not to be afraid of any crossroads in my life.”

As group discussions commenced around the tables, associate professor Régine Michelle Jean-Charles (Romance languages and literatures) turned to the young women in her circle and asked, “What are the biggest crossroads you have faced?” A student considering a two-year teaching position overseas wondered if she could pack up her life and leave her friends behind. Another wondered whether she should return to the Midwest to be nearer to her mother after being so far from home for four years. “Each decision seems momentous for the rest of your life,” said a senior, as the others nodded. Jean-Charles told them, “We don’t know our paths. Things change around you. Things happen in life. Let your passions guide you more than your job, your title.”

At another table, where campus minister Margaret Nuzzolese ’06, MTS’16, sat, a student talked about Moore’s story as a lesson in “finding your adventurous spirit. Don’t squash it. So many students are going instead for something more conventional.” But another young woman confessed to feeling that she hadn’t yet found her passion.

In various ways, the mentors asked their mentees, What do you need to make your decisions? The students said patience, perspective, faith in themselves. One student deflected the question, admitting that she was having trouble thinking about her future at all.

Like Moore in her talk, other mentoring women who took a turn as featured speaker during the year drew from challenging personal experiences. Jean-Charles had spoken about feeling uncertain that she could achieve her ambition to be a full professor by age 40 as the mother of four children, including a baby. “I have a lot of really great mentors in a lot of different areas in my life, but none of them alone presented a model for the kind of life that I’m living,” she said. She wanted to convey to the mentees, “Be courageous to create the life that you would like to have.”

Nuzzolese had acknowledged in her talk that women at Boston College yearn to be their authentic selves while also feeling pressure to be attractive partygoers. She referred to “certain expectations [that] ‘you’re going to meet someone you’ll marry here, you’re going to find exactly your career line.'” “Let yourself dream beyond those things happening here,” she said. “Believe that the choices you make here will ultimately lead to what you are desiring.”

Christina Iacampo ’16, a political science major, says Rise has “forced us to think about questions that maybe don’t come up when you are just hanging out with your friends—and maybe you don’t even want to bring up,” especially if “you still don’t have plans.” After she graduates, Iacampo will spend a year in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, working with Catholic Charities in Nashville, Tennessee.

Abby MacLean, a senior in the Lynch School of Education, says of Rise, “So many of the talks we had were about that we don’t know what is coming. . . . To know that I do have all the skills to go out there into the real world, and seeing all these women who weren’t sure and how they succeeded and what they are doing now—it’s a really good feeling.”

Based on student interest, “Rise will certainly be offered again next year,” says Dalton. “We already have over 40 juniors who applied this past year and were deferred.”